'The novelist's job is to say what other people won't say, and take the consequences'

GERARD DONOVAN (pictured) grew up in Galway and now lives in the US. He is best-known for novels such as Schopenhauer's Telescope(longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, 2003) and the bestselling Julius Winsome(2006), which has been published in many languages. Before turning to fiction, he published three acclaimed poetry collections.

In recent years, he has made the journey from being a poet living in Ireland to being a novelist living in a cabin in the woods in the US. Here, he talks to Dermot Bolger about the process of writing Julius Winsome, a novel about a solitary man living alone who extracts a terrible revenge when hunters callously shoot the dog who is his sole companion.

GERARD DONOVAN:"I moved from Ireland firstly to Arkansas, where my brother was a runner, and then I enrolled in a masters programme in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. That was really important because it was my first exposure to the hard world of what the best people in America were doing in a workshop format in fiction. I learnt so much from that one intensive year.

"Then I moved up to New York, where I live in a cabin in eastern Long Island, 70 miles east of New York, in the woods, which is where all the novels have been written. J ulius Winsomeis set literally in the cabin where I live and the descriptions in Julius Winsomeare, for the most part, based on what I see when I look out my window.

“But I didn’t want the novel to be based on Long Island, so after I had written a first draft I went up the most northern town in Maine, an 18-hour drive, and I realised that Maine is where I wanted the novel to be set. Then I started adding in details pertaining to northern Maine and did some research, driving into the woods and getting lost in the dark and finding where Julius lived and hearing bears and being frightened myself. A lot of the scenes from the novel came from that trip. For instance, there is a scene where Julius goes to a little cafe and two wolves jump up. That happened to me exactly, word for word as in the novel.”

DERMOT BOLGER:"You say the novel grew by an extra 20 per cent after that trip to Maine. How much research should a writer do? If you do too much in advance, do you feel burdened by having gathered all that information? It's interesting that you wrote the first draft in your cabin and only then went to Maine to make the research fit. It seems like you had the imaginative journey first. If you had gone to Maine first, do you think it would have become a different book?

GD:"I think the first rule is to tell a compelling story, and everything else hangs on that. So do whatever you have to do to tell that great story, even if you have to ignore some research in order to get the essential human element.

“With Julius, one element of research I had already done is that I lived with a pit bull terrier for five years. a much-maligned breed that does not deserve its reputation because the conditions where you hear about them attacking people are based on them being chained up or kept in small spaces and made to fight with each other. I lived with this dog for five years and it took me five years to learn the language of dogs, how dogs relate to you, how they speak to you, and all of that went into the novel.

“I knew what the woods were like around my house, and I knew the town and I knew my dog. I knew the story because someone actually shot my neighbour’s dog in real life and the dog had gone 500 yards and collapsed in the flowers, although the dog in real life survived. I was talking to myself afterwards and wondering what would I do if someone shot my dog, and the answer was that I would have killed them. You see, the thing about being a novelist is you have to admit things in public – the novelist’s job is to say what other people won’t say, and take the consequences. That is my view of it: the novelist should be first. (Politicians will be last – they will follow whatever has been done first.)

“It was an uncomfortable truth. Have I ever shot anyone? No. But in my mind I said if I could get away with it and I knew who had done it, I would probably kill them.

“Faced with that enormous discovery about my own nature, I was walking around one day and the whole novel came to me within a minute and I knew what its name was going to be. I knew the voice of the novel and I also knew there was going to be a Shakespearean element within the novel, that Julius would speak Shakespearean to his victims. The more he spoke Elizabethan English to his victims, the more violent he was becoming, because he was employing the tactics of revenge from a previous age. an age he should have lived in and would have been more comfortable in.

“The research I did after that first draft was driving up to Fort Kent and measuring how long it would take to drive from that part of the woods into town; walking around town; taking pictures of every single building; and hearing people’s voices, so that I could get the dialogue right.”

DB:"You are not Julius, but when you are creating a character, the character must begin as part of you and then take on a life of its own. Is that a strange journey?"

GD:"Margaret Atwood says that the act of writing is where real life, or what writers call their material, begins to run up against what they call literature, which is the crafted story that the reader sees. The writer somehow lives in the middle, between real life and the crafted work. So the parts of Julius that aren't me are there because I felt a duty to express a story that the reader would be riveted by.

“I’m a storyteller and see myself as a storyteller and I think the writer has an obligation to create something that has an urgency to it, and that means invention and lying – as you know, we are professional liars.”

DB:"So if somebody was writing a novel based on one aspect of their own life, would your advice be to go with that and write about it honestly but also to be prepared for the fact that what you write is like a parallel imaginative universe and, at a certain stage, a character will become somebody different and when that happens they should go with it?

GD:"If I asked everyone in a class to take out a piece of paper and, on the understanding that no human being would ever see it, that you could tear it up immediately, I asked you to write a secret on it about yourself that you have never told anyone and never will, would you be able to do it? That is the power of writing. Even though you are the only one ever going to see it, would you still be able to write it down? Are you prepared to do that in a novel and give the secret to a character you invent and have that character carry your secret?

“A novel is an expression of one’s self but you have the safety net that the character is not you. You invent characters who represent you and there are embellishments and exaggerations required because it is a story in a novel.

“James Baldwin said when you are writing you realise that the very things that hurt you the most are the things that, as a writer, are going to help you most. You have to go to those places you don’t want to go.”